Your mindset makes the difference: Website v Business

Published on May 23, 2012 Your mindset makes the difference: Website v Business

Whatever you do in life, your overall approach and attitude does make a difference. If you’re starting an online shop, how you think about your shopping cart website can make all the difference to how well you succeed with it. Even with the Australian dollar back on the way down, search engines changing the game, and retailers taking an ongoing battering from their demanding customers (or lack thereof) that makes them feel like they’re landing on the beaches of Normandy, there are still opportunities to be had if you have the right approach and mindset to your online business.

You are just as capable as anyone else of building a successful business but as a starting point you must think of it like a business and not just a website where you can sell things.

What’s the difference between an online business and an ecommerce website? A business is everything that you do – when you talk to people in the street you tell people about it, when you think about who employs you, you think about the site, you think about it more than just a tool to put money into your bank account or a sales channel for something else.

It has business cards, fax templates, a phone number, email address, it’s everything you do and you’re passionate about it. You are determined to make it succeed no matter what you do. When you go to sleep you’re thinking about what you can do next to make it successful. And it’s not just a convenient way to charge out your time, it’s something that you could contract others to work with you on, or one day train a successor. It’s something you are prepared to take risks with to make it succeed, but are prepared to do the careful planning to ensure those risks are the right ones and not gambles.

In short, a business is an entity in itself, a life form, embodied in the Internet. Is Facebook just a social media website or a business? It’s a business. And it was from the first day it was founded. If you’re still not sure, you can watch the movie Facebook as there are some valuable insights there.

When you start thinking about your business rather than your website, you stop thinking about the technology behind the site – the graphics, the font placements, the formatting troubles, the email setup, and start thinking about the marketing of the business, the management of the business and how it will succeed.

• What is your overall differentiation compared to others in the market? What makes you different? How can you protect those differences so that others can’t just copy you (and do it better)
• How well do you know the customers of your site? Are you trying to target everyone (common mistake) or target a particular group or type of person? How will you connect with them? What’s going on in their minds? Do they even know they will want to be customers of yours?
• Who will make up your team? You might not have employees or staff, but who will you turn to as trusted suppliers? Just because you’re paying someone doesn’t mean they can’t be treated as an important part of your business. Get their advice, they might be able to offer you something you didn’t know or realise.
• What is your strategy to compete with the others in the industry? Are you going to be a time to market leader, an innovator, a price leader (not necessarily the lowest price either), a cost leader, a quality leader? If you want to be super successful you need to lead the way with some aspect of your business compared to the rest of the market, as this will give you “the edge”.
• There are wolves waiting to prey on your profits and they usually come in the form of cheap overseas producers who capitalise on products that do not have trademarks and produce them faster and cheaper than the originals. If you’re producing something to sell in your online businesss, save yourself and get a trademark.
• What other forces can impinge on your business and how will you deal with them? Will you be affected by the carbon tax? Foreign affairs policy of government? Trade laws? Import laws? Will you benefit from the government’s new privacy amendments? Changes in the Australian dollar? The decisions of competitors?
• How can you harness factors like social media to make your business a success? Is there any aspect of the social world that has led to a gap that you could take advantage of? What’s the one thing that’s missing in the minds of your customers?

You want to make your business succeed? Then plan. This doesn’t mean you can’t do things off plan or know in advance what you’re going to do. It means you need to be prepared for the contingencies – think – what will you do if things go wrong? If you take a risk and it fails, what’s your fall back plan? If you plan things won’t catch you off guard and when they do it won’t matter.